I won’t bury the lede with this one – as the title suggests, I’m writing this from my new home in Costa Rica! How I got here is a bit of a wild ride and I still can’t quite believe it. I will say that this feels like a very full circle moment after coming here for the first time in 2015, falling in love with the country and travelling in general, and now being back long term in 2023. It all happened very quickly so writing this blog is as much to process it a bit more myself as to explain it to anyone else!
Before I get into the job and the application process, let me give a bit of background. I have history with Costa Rica that goes back to when I was 17. During the summer before my final year of high school, I spent a month in Costa Rica as part of a culture and volunteering programme with an NGO called GVI. I spent a week living with a host family and taking Spanish lessons, two weeks helping to refurbish a primary school and one week doing adventure activities like canyoning, ziplining and white water rafting. The whole experience had a profound impact on me. I think this experience inspired my love of travelling and my desire to see the world. It is also responsible for a large part of who I am now, or at least starting me on the path to becoming that person. I came back much more sure of the person that I wanted to be, independent, adventurous, confident. Below is a quote from a blog that I wrote just after getting back that is still very poignant today:
This trip has ignited a desire to travel in me, one that was already there but has now been sparked. It has also shown me the way I want to spend the rest of my life – seeing the world and helping as much of it as I can. So until next time – ¡pura vida Costa Rica!
I was able to go back to Quepos, the town where I stayed during the first three weeks of my GVI programme, the following year. I was living in Honduras and I had a couple of months off from teaching. A group of six volunteers were travelling together and this was one stop that I insisted on. I visited my host family who were very impressed with my much improved Spanish. I was also able to visit the GVI base, a different one from where I had volunteered but interesting all the same. It was nice to still feel like I was connected to GVI and step back to the past.
Fast forward eight years later, I’m very happily living the life that I’ve worked hard to make for myself. I’ve just finished teaching in France for two years, I’m travelling in Central America and Colombia for two and a half months over the summer and I’m looking forward to returning to Scotland after my trip and finding a job in the tourism industry. This is what I had planned for myself and I was really looking forward to it. Then I got hit with a very unexpected curveball.
I was sitting in a bus station in Cartagena in the north of Colombia, waiting to head to Tayrona national park. I was killing time and checking my emails when one came in from GVI. Back in May I went to an online careers day with them so they had my CV on file. I had also spoken briefly to someone from the recruitment team in June but wasn’t available for any roles because of my trip. I also didn’t really see it as something that would be on the cards for the immediate future but more something I would be interested in further down the line. I wasn’t expecting to open the email and have an offer to interview for my dream job!
The position was as Education Coordinator at their community base in Cartago, Costa Rica. They were looking for someone who spoke Spanish and reading through the job ad, it was like it had been written for me! It wasn’t as a full time English teacher, something I wanted to move away from, but still working in a school, supervising volunteers that would be doing the teaching, helping them with lesson planning, building the curriculum and generally supporting volunteers through their experience. This kind of job has always been something that I’ve been interested in doing and if you look at my job history, you can see that interest permeating through. From my most recent work as an English teacher to working with young adults who want to volunteer with Project Trust, the organisation I went to Honduras with, even to staying involved with GVI as an ambassador, it felt like it had all lead, albeit accidentally, to this moment.
I immediately said yes to the interview but because of our travel plans, I was away from the internet for a few days and didn’t really think about it. When we arrived in Minca, a small, very relaxed town in the mountains of northern Colombia, I really started to prepare for the interview which would be at the end of our few days there. However, as well as getting ready, I was also deciding if I actually wanted the job! The idea of moving to Costa Rica at the end of that trip was such a wild departure from the picture I had painted in my head of moving back to Scotland. There was no easy way to get around the hard feelings so as is my way when I’m a bit stressed, I went for a swim in the hostel pool. At one point, my friend and travel buddy Hannah looked over to see me leaning against the side of the pool staring off into space, looking as if I was having a bit of a breakdown! I probably was but at the end of the swim I had figured out how I felt.
It came down to two things. First of all, this wasn’t the plan! For 8 months I had been determined that I was going to go back to Scotland, be near family and friends, in a country and culture that I am comfortable in and start working in an industry that I thought would suit my interests and skills very well. I found that hard to get over initially. But you know what they say, when you make a plan, the universe laughs. This being unexpected didn’t feel like a good enough reason to say no. I was also in a perfect position to take the job and move across the world – no house, no car, no partner or dependants to worry about. There’s no guarantee that this opportunity would come again or that if it did, I would be in as good a situation to take advantage of it. The second thing was that I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t taking the job because I felt like I should. I knew this was a great opportunity and it is literally the kind of job, maybe even the literal job, that I’ve wanted to do since I was 17 and on a GVI programme myself. I won’t take you through all of the mental gymnastics that got me to the other side of this one but by the time I got out of the pool I had decided – I wanted this job. And I really wanted it.
Thus ensued the first interview – it went pretty well despite extremely spotty hostel wifi – and the second – ten minutes long in a hostel co-working space, still with spotty wifi – until one fresh and sunny morning in Medellín when I received an email offering me the job! Fast forward to the end of my trip three weeks later and I was flying back to Scotland for a whistle-stop, week-long visit home. I was originally thinking of heading straight from Colombia to Costa Rica to save the money on the flight from Scotland, even if I lost out on my already booked flight home from Bogotá. However, when I said goodbye to my friends and family, particularly my 96 year old grandad, at the start of my trip, it was for two and a half months, not for potentially a year! With a bit of encouragement (read pleading) from my parents and sisters, I decided that even a brief visit would be worthwhile.
A week of quality time at home was good for the body, mind and soul. I spent five days running around, catching up with friends in Edinburgh and Glasgow, spending time with my gran who had come over from Northern Ireland for the weekend, getting another tattoo, cuddling my dog, meeting my two new cats and visiting my grandad before spending the last two days packing and preparing for another move across the world. You’d think I’d be used to it by now but packing still always takes longer than I expect. One 3am start later and I was off to San José via Paris!
I’ve now been here for a week, I’m settling into life on base and getting into the routine of it here. On the whole, I do feel well prepared for Move Across the World: Part 4812596. Some of the more difficult things about starting over somewhere completely new – the isolation, lack of routine – are already abated by virtue of the job I’m doing and I already know and love Costa Rica, even if the area I’m living in is new to me. Some of the shock of being quite suddenly on the other side of the world from my friends and family when I’d been planning on the exact opposite has been abated by the fact that my sister is soon moving to the British Virgin Islands (a series of islands next to Puerto Rico in the Caribbean) and a Christmas there together might be on the cards!
I’m not sure how much I’m going to share about this job here moving forward. There will definitely be lots of general Costa Rica content and maybe one more post explaining a bit more about my responsibilities and day to day life (let me know if you have any specific questions!). Beyond that (and once I’ve gotten through my hefty backlog from this summer), you’ll have to stick around to find out!
Sara Somewhere 